Comment by donatj

I frankly can't agree more.

Learn SQL, learn the normal forms at least up to 3NF, profit.

I took an Oracle SQL class in High School in the very early 2000s and frankly it set me up for my career, despite never having touched actual Oracle SQL I've become the go to guy at every job I've had for optimizing queries and reviewing designs.

I read a book on how MySQL actually worked under the hood in the late aughts and it really went a long way towards the effort.

It's really not as hard as the complexity of modern ORM tooling likes to make it seem. That scares people away. It's an elegant language for a more elegant age.

I went to a talk like 10 years ago about how SQL will be displaced by Hadoop/MapReduce in the next 5 years. I posted on Twitter about it at the time like we'll see if that happens. Spoilers, it didn't. I can't even think of the last time I've heard someone invoke the name of Hadoop